Winter Heart

by B. G. Thomas

  Wyatt shook his head. “I should have left him, but I believed him. I believed him when he said that if I left him, I wouldn’t have any friends—”

  But I do! I have such wonderful friends!

  “—and that no one would want me—”

  But gods, the look in Kevin’s eyes! He wants me!

  “—and I would be alone for the rest of my life.”

  “Oh, sweet Little Bear. Don’t you see it? It is the other way around. No one likes Howard. No one can stand him! They only put up with him because they like you—love you! Not the other way around.”

  Wyatt sat bolt upright in his chair.

  “What?”

  “Oh, sweet Wyatt. None of us liked him. Not anyone that called you friend. They didn’t put up with you. They put up with him.”

  Kevin took Wyatt’s hands in both of his and gently stroked the web between his thumb and forefinger as he had done before. Once again it made Wyatt tremble.

  “I think the only people who like Howard are the people who don’t know him.”

  Kevin was saying these things about Howard? About Big Sir? It couldn’t be true.

  “Think about it, Wyatt. You were the one everyone cheered for onstage. Did Howard ever get onstage except for maybe to show off his big cock?”

  The time Howard played Pan in my Queen song about wanting to break free.

  The whole theme of the act was escaping the enforced rules of organized religion. He’d gotten several of the Men’s Festival attendees to dress up as famous religious figures to be his backup dancers. And Howard had pointed out that he’d been Pan for Halloween a few years ago, and it had shocked Wyatt that he wanted to actually be on the stage with him. That he would be Pan, and Wyatt’s other friends would play Jesus and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha.

  Then it hit him.

  It had been Howard’s idea that he pull his dick out—

  “I mean,” Howard had said, “isn’t Pan’s big cock showing in every picture you’ve ever seen of him?”

  —and he had been so thrilled that Howard had actually, for once, wanted to be in one of his acts that he said okay, even though that meant he couldn’t put it on YouTube (and he’d really wanted to put that act on YouTube because it was the best act he’d ever done).

  Was the reason he wanted to be in the act to try to give Wyatt second billing to his cock? Wyatt gasped.

  “Jesus, Wyatt! That is why Howard put you down all the time! He was jealous. He knew everyone loved you. And he hated it. Before you started coming to Festival, he thought he was king of the hill. But once he started bringing you, everyone started paying attention to you.”

  Could it be?

  “B-but I thought they were just being nice,” he said. “The way you should always be nice when someone you care about gets into a relationship. You welcome their new honey.”

  “That’s what you do,” Kevin said. “Because you are a dear, sweet person, and you always want people to feel welcome. But the reason everyone was nice to you was because they genuinely liked you. And within no time, you were the one people wanted to be around. And he couldn’t stand it.”

  Wyatt shivered. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Me?” he somehow managed to say.

  “You, Wyatt. You. Only you.”

  Then Kevin got up and pulled Wyatt to his feet and covered his face with kisses.

  AND STILL they waited.

  They started by reading to each other. Kevin was first. He opened Wyatt’s copy of Eat, Pray, Love and read out loud the chapter he said was one of his favorites. It was all about the author making a contract with the Universe. How she had physically written up her request and then signed it, and her friend signed it, and then they sat and imagined everyone they knew who would sign it. Her mother and father and sister. Friends. The two of them imagined them actually signing it. Felt it. And then they got into it and thought of other people they didn’t even know that they thought would sign it. Bill and Hillary Clinton. Saint Francis of Assisi. Abraham Lincoln. Nelson Mandela. Gandhi. Mother Teresa. Jimmy Carter. Eleanor Roosevelt. The Dalai Lama. And then, like a miracle, just a few hours later, what the author wanted came true.

  “I remember that part now,” Wyatt said. “And it’s like that thing you said. Ask. Believe. Receive.” He was trembling with the idea. Could it be that simple?

  “It’s just like that, Wyatt,” Kevin said.

  Then Wyatt took the book and leafed through it and found one of his favorite passages and shared it. They were back on the bed now, and they’d pulled the bearskin up around them. There was a little hot chocolate left, and they shared that from the big red Thermos lid. Wyatt read about how Elizabeth Gilbert—the author—fell away from a religious teaching. How she had a friend that said you shouldn’t cherry-pick your religion but Elizabeth disagreed. “I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God.” He read the whole chapter, and Kevin listened to every word, never faded away, never interrupted him to ask if he’d seen that e-mail about “how we can save big on life-extending vitamins.”

  Wyatt had Kevin’s undivided attention.

  And when he was done, Kevin enthusiastically said, “Yes! I especially love where she says that we have the right to find any metaphor we need as we cross the ‘worldly divide’ so that we can feel elated—ecstatic—or comforted.”

  After that, Kevin had more he wanted to share. But first he made sure that Wyatt didn’t mind (when had Howard ever done that?). “Do you mind if I read one of my favorite sections in here?” Kevin asked. “It’s about a page….”

  Wyatt didn’t mind at all. He loved hearing Kevin’s rich, deep voice. “Go for it,” Wyatt said. “Why stop now?”

  So Kevin read from the book he said was one of his favorites. Leap and the Net Will Appear! by Malcolm Kane.

  “In 1957,” he began, “a huge plaster Buddha had to be moved from its temple to another location due to a highway being built through Bangkok. When the crane began to lift it, to the horror of the monks, it started to crack. They had it lowered back to the ground and covered it with a tarp because it was going to rain. Later, when the head monk went to check on it with a flashlight, he was surprised when something shone back at him.”

  Kevin looked up from the page. Was Wyatt still listening?

  He smiled when he saw he was. He was paying attention to every word!

  “He went and got a hammer and chisel and began to chip away at the cement. And what did he find? To his astonishment he found that he had uncovered a golden statue over ten feet tall, two and a half tons in weight and estimated at a value of 196 million dollars!

  “Historians believe that a few hundred years before, when Thailand (known as Siam at that time) was about to be invaded by the Burmese army, the monks who ran the monastery covered the Buddha with cement to keep it from being looted. It appears that sometime after that the army slaughtered them. And therefore there was no one left alive who knew about the Golden Buddha. So for years and years, the monks who gained possession of that statue had no idea their Buddha was golden!

  “What this story tells us metaphysically is we are like that statue of the Buddha. We are golden. But we have covered ourselves with years and layers of muck. We came to believe that we are common, worthless, and undeserving. And that is most untrue!

  “For years I let my stepfather mistreat me. He regaled me with tales of how lucky I was that he’d married my mother. That if it weren’t for him, she and I would be on the streets. That we would have lost our home and our car and everything. My dad had died and left us with considerable debts. My stepfather told me I was worthless. That had it been left to me, we would have been lost. That he had saved us and that I had done nothing, and what was more, I was still doing nothing.

  “And then I began to really think about what he’d said.

  “First, I realized that there was nothing I could have done to help me and my mother out of the predicament we were in.
I was little. I was a kid! What was I supposed to do?

  “But to my surprise, the rest… rang true. As an adult I still wasn’t doing anything with my life. And whose fault was that? Certainly not his. Unless I really was worthless. And I sat down in the park and thought about it more. What could I do?

  “Then this… voice whispered in my ear. I heard it. Clear as crystal. And it said, ‘Why not pursue your dreams?’

  “And to my surprise, the only answer I could really give was, ‘Yeah. Why not?’

  “Of course, I didn’t do it overnight. It took me a while to unbelieve my stepfather. But with friends and teachers and wonderful books, I did learn.

  “What’s more, I learned that under the muck I was golden!

  “We are golden! Each and every one of us!

  “I began to believe in myself. Take care of myself. I made mistakes. But I was chipping away those shards of cement.

  “And soon the gold began to shine.

  “It is important that we know that we are all gold.

  “But sometimes we must first chip away the cement, so that at last, we can truly shine.”

  Kevin looked up from his book to see Wyatt watching him. He saw Wyatt swallow. Neither of them said anything for what seemed forever.

  Then Wyatt said, “Wow…,” and Kevin couldn’t help but smile.

  SOMEHOW THAT turned into them reading the new Stephen King book to each other for several hours until Wyatt’s stomach growled rather fiercely and Kevin decided it was time for dinner.

  Hamburgers.

  Even though there were no buns, there was plenty of bread and there was cheese and chips, and Wyatt couldn’t remember when he’d had such good burgers.

  And it was right in the middle of dinner that the lights came on!

  “Yippee,” Wyatt shouted and jumped to his feet and did some twerking right there. To his surprise, Kevin joined him—and gods, it was hot to see the big muscular man bouncing that big muscular man-ass and being so damned silly—and they made a complete circuit around the table before bursting into laughter.

  They finished their burgers—but not before Wyatt jumped up and plugged in anything and everything that he felt needed charging. Some things the world revolved around, and needing to listen to P!nk was one of them. Wyatt then pulled some pudding cups from one of his bags and declared, “Dessert! Butterscotch, and unlike Walter, I love butterscotch pudding!”

  Kevin looked at him blankly.

  Did he explain what that meant? Did he tell him about Fringe, one of his favorite shows of all time? “Never mind, it would take too long to explain.”

  Then to his surprise, Kevin’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “Are you talking about Walter on Fringe?”

  Wyatt grinned near to splitting. He knew. Kevin knew!

  And to his surprise Kevin did a passable imitation of John Noble as Fringe’s elderly crazy man. “They have this horrible pudding here. Butterscotch pudding on Mondays; it’s dreadful.”

  “It’s Thursday,” Wyatt responded gleefully, quoting the next line from the episode.

  “Oh,” Kevin responded. “That’s fantastic news.”

  They both burst into laughter.

  Wyatt pulled open his container, and realizing the spoons were half a room away—and feeling a tad lazy—he stuck his finger into the cup and pulled out a glob of golden-brown pudding and stuck it in his mouth. Did he suck it off sexily, or not? Uncharacteristically, he decided on “not” and then began happily blathering about one unimportant thing or another, most of it somehow revolving around how happy he was that Ben Franklin flew a kite in the rain and Thomas Edison invented light bulbs.

  But then something hit him.

  He sat bolt upright in his chair. “Oh, gosh.”

  Kevin looked up from his pudding. “What?”

  Wyatt swallowed and wondered how to bring this up. Because he found himself not wanting the logical answer.

  “What?” Kevin asked, with a growing expression of concern drawn on his face.

  Well, shit on a stick. Wyatt sighed. “Now that the electricity is back on… will you be going back to your cabin?” He couldn’t believe how much he wanted Kevin to say no.

  A startled look came to Kevin’s face. “Oh!”

  So he hadn’t thought about that either.

  “I guess….”

  Was that disappointment in his voice?

  “I mean, you came here to be alone, right?”

  “Yeah,” Wyatt said reluctantly. “B-but….”

  “But?” Kevin said, sitting up straighter in his seat.

  “I…. That doesn’t seem as important anymore. For me.” But then, hadn’t Kevin come to Camp to be alone as well? “But….”

  “But?” Kevin repeated.

  “Didn’t you come here to be alone too?”

  Kevin slumped ever so slightly. Pursed his lips. Looked away. “I guess I did.”

  There was a long pause.

  Kevin looked back at him, eyes deep and unreadable.

  Again, neither said anything for a long time. But wasn’t this Kevin’s turn?

  Finally, unable to stand it any longer—please say you don’t want to leave, please say you don’t want to leave—Wyatt said, “If you need to….” Please say you don’t want to leave….

  Another pause as all kinds of things seemed to flash over Kevin’s face. “I don’t know, Wyatt. Because to tell you the truth, I’m not fully sure why I came.”

  “I… I don’t understand.”

  “It was lots of things, Wyatt. It was this strange and deep calling of the Land.”

  Wyatt nodded. He understood that call. Luckily he was less than an hour’s drive from Camp Sanctuary. There were a lot of people, like Kevin, for whom that wasn’t the case.

  “It was the fact that… someone died.”

  It was Wyatt’s turn to sit up. “Died?” he asked. “Oh gosh, Kevin. You didn’t say anything about someone dying.” Did you? Had he, and Wyatt had been too self-absorbed to hear it? “Did you?”

  Kevin shook his head. “I didn’t.”

  Because I was going on and on and on about myself? Wyatt wondered.

  “But not because of you.”

  Wyatt breathed an inward sigh of relief.

  “I…. It was private. And you and I talked about so many other things.”

  “My things,” Wyatt said. “I’m sorry.”

  Kevin’s eyes flickered. “Why? I’m an adult. If I needed to talk about something, it’s my responsibility to bring it up.”

  Really? Because you’ve asked me all kinds of questions about myself. From throwing baby Jesus out with the bathwater to whether the better version of P!nk’s song “Perfect” included the word “fuck.” Kevin, surprisingly, liked the cleaner version of the song.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Really,” Kevin stated.

  Pause.

  “So you don’t want to talk about it, then? Like your… friend dying?”

  “I don’t know what to say, Wyatt.”

  Pause.

  “Was this someone close to you? I mean… to make you drive to Camp. Don’t you live out east? New York or something?”

  There was a slight smile on Kevin’s face. “Yes. New York City. Rosebank in Staten Island to be precise.”

  That didn’t mean anything to Wyatt, but he nodded anyway.

  “Cauley was my ex,” Kevin said.

  “Oh.”

  “We haven’t been together in quite a while. But we stayed friends. I found out I could be friends with him when I wasn’t worried what he was up to.”

  “Up to?” Did that mean what it meant when it came to Howard?

  There was pain in Kevin’s eyes now, and Wyatt wondered if he should have let this go.

  “We were together for quite a while. I fell for him fast and heavy. We met at a birthday picnic for a mutual friend in Central Park.” A flicker of a smile passed over Kevin’s face. “He was funny and crazy and wild and did the silliest things.” T
he smile grew a bit. “I was hooked.” He looked at Wyatt. “I guess I—no, I know I lived vicariously through him. He was insane.” Kevin laughed. “But in a good way. Dressed up in crazy outfits. And he was an activist. A really well-known one in New York. Did you know he once—with some cronies, of course—painted some closeted senator’s house in the rainbow colors while the man was out of town? I don’t know how the fuck he did it.”

  No, Wyatt didn’t know that. It sounded cool, though, and he told Kevin so.

  “No, of course you wouldn’t. Why would you?”

  The sadness came back and Wyatt immediately wished there was something he could do about it.

  “The problem with Cauley is that he just burned too bright, do you know what I mean?”

  Wyatt wasn’t sure. But then a scene from a movie came to him. Rutger Hauer playing an android replicant about to murder his maker.

  “It’s like that line out of that movie Blade Runner,” Kevin said as if reading his mind. “‘The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.’ And Cauley burned really bright, Wyatt. People loved him too. Trouble is, he didn’t believe it. This was a man who traveled all over doing education on safe sex and the dangers of meth. And what happens?” Kevin took a big shuddering breath. “He somehow got mixed up with a bunch of meth heads!” Kevin shook his head and then his voice dropped to a whisper. “He doesn’t even know how he got HIV. Doesn’t remember. He started doing drugs and cheating on me, and he got HIV and doesn’t even remember how. He had no idea who gave it to him. And I couldn’t deal with it. I think I could have forgiven a mistake or two. I could have helped him deal with the drugs. I did, in fact. I could have forgiven him for an infidelity. No one is perfect. But putting my life in danger and then lying about it?” He shook his head.

  Wyatt shivered, struck by some of the similarities of their stories.

  Kevin looked at him again. “And when you were sharing about Howard, I didn’t want to steal anything from it by talking about my troubles. When someone is pouring out their heart, the last thing they want is for someone to one-up them.”